Skift Asks: What’s the Most Popular Way to Share Travel Photos?

While Facebook continues to be the “Facebook of Travel,” people still love something more permanent for their travel photos.

— Rafat Ali

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Editor’s Note: Last week we launched a new weekly survey series “Skift Asks“,to test out the assumptions travel industry insiders have on various consumer travel issues, trying to bridge the disconnect between the industry and consumers.

This week we asked consumers a basic question: “What is the most important service for you to share your travel photos?” The focus in this question is social sharing services (that act as photo repositories, too), but we added print photos as a throwaway, to see if people are still opting for what we assume are old-school methods for sharing travel photos.

And here, implicitly, we’re working under the assumption that travel photos are a parallel but distinct breed to regular daily life photo sharing. If a traveler has spent hundreds or even thousands of dollars to take a trip, the assumption it the sharing of memories coming out of the trip is less ephemeral than regular daily moments.

We found the answers to the survey part-surprising, part-obvious: Facebook rules the world of travel photos in U.S., and if you add Instagram to it, which it owns, the company is the de facto repository of the travel memories in this country.

But a good portion of people still turn to print photos, a more permanent repository of travel memories to share with family and friends.

As many as one third chose print as the most important tool for them. Another surprise: Twitter is a tiny part of the travel photo world, despite all the media noise about the social service as a pulse of the consumer sentiment.

This single-question survey was administered to the U.S. internet population from Aug 1-Aug 4, through Google Consumer Surveys, with 1501 responses. The methodology is explained here.

Key insight: This would be obvious, but older people use print photos more.

On Gender: Women use Facebook and print photos more, Flickr and Twitter are a lot more male dominated.

On Age: The margin of error here is very high, but you can see how Instagram is the most young-skewing.

By Geography in U.S.: Facebook is the standard across U.S.

On Income Scale: The rich (presumably older) still love printing photos.

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